Equipment:

Mount: EQ6-R PRO

Telescope: Astro-Tech AT60ED

Field Flattener: Astro-Tech AT60FF

Camera: ASI533-MC Pro

Imaging Details:

95 Lights (30 second exposures, 300 gain) 25 Darks 25 Flats 25 Dark Flats

Processing Details:

I first stacked the FITS using DSS and then took the TIFF and used SIRILs scripts to process the image by performing

1. Background extraction
2. Photometric color calibration
3. Then performed an auto stretch
4. Then performed some color saturation

I then took the result from SIRIL and further processed using PhotoShop.

I used the camera raw filter within PhotoShop to:

1. Further tune the saturation and vibrance
2. Make adjustments to the green and blue color channels to turn those down

beautiful, its a shame we wont be alive to see it merge with the milky way

Or a blessing haha, I feel like that would be both beautiful and terrifying.

Unlikely that our Earth will be smashed into anything when it does. There's so much empty space that it's statistically unlikely anything collides, or so I've read.

It'll be a very gentle affair at stellar scales, highly unlikely to have any noticeable effect, so sparse are the stars spread. Also, movement on human time spans won't be apparent. While still extremely unlikely, a possible close pass of a star could perturb the Oort cloud, sending comets/asteroids inward (and outward).

Also, the Earth will likely not be habitable at that time due to the Sun's changes.

I'm great fun at parties.

I'm more concerned that Earth would be affected by the gravity of something else and be slingshot out of the mix

Is the center of the galaxy a lot more unstable considering it almost looks like a single point of light? Or are all the stars still far enough from each other to not really have an effect on each other?

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That's definitely more of a possibility, good observation. Now that I think of it, happy to think I won't be alive to witness it, but still an exciting thought. I wish I could be like an immortal God to witness the orchestral dance of the cosmos. Truly beautiful, the ultimate beauty of existence are the heavens.

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Do galaxies just look gassy without all the foreground stars?

I would look into getting the NoiseXTerminator plugin for photoshop. It's $60 and super simple to use, and could probably do a lot for this image.

Pretty much, yes. You can't resolve many (if any) individual stars in Andromeda with backyard equipment.

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Still 10s or 100s of light years apart, things would definitely be more interesting in the center of the galaxies as they merge but not by much.

If the earth was flung out of the solar system by something elses gravity, then it's likely the rest of the solar system, or the majority of it, would be destroyed as well. My biggest fear is a black hole coming close to earth, because there likely won't be anything we could do about.

OP uses a 60mm aperture telescope - the one I have is 70mm (not significantly larger) and has resolved stars in both M31 and M33 quite easily. Of course, most of the stars won't be resolved but capturing the giants in NGC 206 is not difficult

I think that if I had taken longer exposures, 1m+ I possibly could have resolved stars closer towards the center, but im also not sure, the center is quite bright.

The center doesn't have too many bright stars, though it does have some really interesting dust spirals (for comparison, I recently reedited my own M31 data). You captured some of NGC 206 in your photo though, if you look closely you may see some pinpoints (hard to tell from Imgur)

I do think that I see some pinpoints there: last night I actually gathered some more data and reedited, if your interested here is the full resolution photo: https://www.astrobin.com/56dgkp/B/ unlike you I am not guiding, nor did I gather anywhere near the amount of data that you did, I do have a guide scope arriving tomorrow, im still a baby in this hobby of mine haha.

The solar system around the star 3 from the top right and 4 down has a celestial body with a great place that makes homemade kettle chips

I have no idea what your talking about 🤣

If you look at the top right corner of the picture and go three stars over and 4 stars down, that’s star hosts a solar system with a celestial body that has a restaurant with great kettle chips. Idk how else to explain it. Crazy their planet has the potato also but you’ll find out more about that in 2048 😉

Its amazing and mind boggling that mostly every single dot is a star and they are densely packed, yet they are light years apart from each other.

Question: If we can see (unaided) many distant galaxies in the night sky, why isn't Andromeda visible in the sky?

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Not entirely true. ‘You’ won’t exist but there’s a chance you would essentially live on as a clone. Recovering memories would be a very very very difficult step due to cells dying

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Earth will be uninhabitable by then anyway.

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it's readily visible! just not nearly as stunning as OPs pic. but you can see quite a bit of it with the naked eye.

Do you think Andromeda thinks about us as much as we think about it?

For me I am unable to see it unaided. I believe a lot has to do with your local light pollution

There are actually three galaxies visible in the image--Messier 31 is the big one. The round fuzzy to the left is M32, the oval fuzzy to the right is M110. Both are satellite galaxies of M31, like the Magellanic clouds are to our Milky Way.

Thanks for pointing this out, it's absolutely true. I did not think to list that in the title because I wasn't able to get much detail out of them.

As an aside if anyone wants to see this and a few others I took last night in full resolution, you can find them with annotations here: https://www.astrobin.com/users/rrbailey89/

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Whenever I see a picture of this galaxy, I always wonder if there’s an intelligent life form over there, looking at a picture of the Milky Way, and pondering the same thing.

Question: Can we resolve them with industrial grade equipment like JWST? I honestly don't know. I'm curious how far away the furthest star is that we can even barely image.

Wow I can’t believe you got this image with only a $600 telescope.

I am just as impressed as you. But it's not just the telescope. The mount and camera pla8a big role the mount is IMO the most important piece

We're planing to go camping there next weekend

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHL0137-LS

28 billion lightyears.

And yes, we can see individual stars in andromeda with big telescopes. Every one of the smaller dots here is a star in andromeda: https://esahubble.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable/

Here's a little preview of what the night sky will look like as Andromeda merges.

I would love to see it in person though. Especially that third panel from the top on the left.

Maybe. There are 1 trillion stars in andromeda so.

Thanks! That's pretty darn cool!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies#Naked-eye_galaxies